Douglas James Shearman (2 July 1918, Isleworth, Middlesex – 12 May 2003, Cassington, Oxfordshire)[1] was a British geologist and sedimentologist, who made significant contributions to the study of evaporites and other sediments and sedimentary rocks in desert climates.
Shearman with his student Brian Evamy developed staining methods that improved microscopic study of the cementation history of limestones.
During work, funded by the UK's DSIR and later by Shell plc, on the Trucial Coast on the Persian Gulf, Shearman's research team recorded the first known example of recent anhydrite.
[7][1] In 1965 in a discussion in a joint meeting of the Institute of Petroleum and Geological Society of London, Shearman suggested that the traditionally accepted idea of evaporites deposited from a standing body of water was wrong.
[7] By the late 1970s the research of Shearman's team convinced sedimentologists that, as salt marshes build out toward the sea, evaporite minerals displace and replace earlier lime sediments.